September 4 to October 18, 2014
509 West 24th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-680-9889

Sculpture once had no other task than to render convincing simulacra of passing phenomena in permanent materials.  If this is “familiar conceptual territory,” as Ken Johnson wrote in his New York Times review of Roxy Paine’s current exhibition at Boesky, all the more impressive is Paine’s relentless, scrupulous, and highly personal exploration of it.  Superstars from Ai Wei Wei to Jeff Koons are using sculptural substitution effectively, if indeed familiarly, with herds of lesser lights toiling in the genre.  But for more than 20 years, Paine has been digging deep: his abiding interest is in how the ideal transformation from one material into another is achieved, and why the artist’s physical touch keeps hanging around as part of the answer.  On the one hand, Paine has painstakingly hand-crafted botanical portraits of astounding variety and detail, and on the other, he has engineered machines that produce gorgeous, or in some cases intentionally grotesque, sculptures, paintings and drawings, works whose authorship is thus unstable. Paine is both the John Henry of contemporary art and the machine against which he is racing.

Paine’s art-making machines were only slightly more beautiful than they needed to be.  With the new work, seductive landscapes of surveillance instruments, tools and equipment carved with uncanny precision from buttery maple, Paine circles back to ponder the machine aesthetic, this time more explicitly.  At least, there can be no functional argument for the solid wood valves and circuitry of his new sculptures, collectively titled Denuded Lens.  But aesthetics are never neutral, and here Paine’s close-to-the-vest hyperrealism invokes the bewitching taxidermies of lost wilderness found in natural history museums – along with their inadvertent prophecy.

The largest piece in the show, Checkpoint (all works 2014) is a full-scale AMNH-style diorama of a typical airport security set-up.  It is the third in a new body of work that freeze-dries contemporary workplaces, absent its humans.  The previous two dioramas (shown at Kavi Gupta in Chicago) depicted idealized, pristine replicas of a power plant control room and a fast food restaurant – all of these rooms are prisons of a kind.  Sterile and still, the only trace of movement in Checkpoint are the rubber flaps of the luggage belts arrested stiffly in mid-bend, as if they’d settled that way years before.  The ensemble carries a skewed perspective through every object along the architectural grid, including ceiling tiles with functioning fluorescents (the only objects in the exhibition rendered in a material other than wood). Checkpoint’s subtle, easily-swallowed perspective distortion is a feat of visual remapping that artists from Hans Holbein to Robert Lazzarini have used to diverse ends.  Paine has said that he was alluding to the spatial –and informational – compression of clandestine snapshots, from which the ghostly scene was, in part, synthesized.  Maybe he was also thinking of the anamorphically skewed skull hidden in Holbein’s The Ambassadors.  Certainly viewers will have no trouble finding a memento mori in this chilling portrait of public space askew.

In the smallest work in the show, a hand-held bullhorn is seamlessly engineered onto the back of a chain saw – again, as modeled in blond maple at actual size, down to tiny dowel pins along the chain of the blade.  To fire up the bullhorn, whose electric power supply is implicitly grafted to the chainsaw’s gas motor, you have to fire up the blade, thus drowning out speech with amplified brute noise.  In any event blade and horn face opposite directions, so leaning in to speak would be suicidal.  An image of this angry object, however double-edged, would work perfectly as a political cartoon – say, above an Op Ed piece about bullying tactics by lumber company lobbyists.  Paine’s title, Speech Impediment, even provides the caption.

If Speech Impediment and Checkpoint are moralistic in tone, other works in the show are more cryptic.  Machine of Indeterminacy and Scrutiny are elaborate, imaginary conflations of scientific-industrial apparatus, with exposed tubing and non-consumer interfaces that call to mind Paine’s own art-making machines.  A central irony of the current sculptures is that many viewers will assume they are simply spit out of a 3-D scan like the myriad luxury readymades now ubiquitous at art fairs.  You have to look closely, and know something of this artist’s extensive record, to decipher the conflation of hand and machine in Paine’s sculpting.  As always, precisely where hand begins and machine ends is very much the question – especially since Paine is no civilian when it comes to computer-controlled carving: ten years ago he custom-built his own Erosion Machine (2005), which turns thick slabs of stone into mini-Bryce Canyons.  That precision sandblaster, implementing statistical data sets, produced a more convincing facture than the “computery” striations of commercially available cutters and extruders executing 3-D digital files.

Theoretically Erosion Machine could go on making gorgeous carvings forever –– thus “eroding” labor-value in art.  On the other hand, it might take a hundred years of production to pay back Paine’s Herculean investment in his one-of-a-kind prototype ­.  A bipolar take on labor is visible in the very woodgrain of these new sculptures.  In Scrutiny, amid a threatening omnigatherum of investigative instruments from telescope to voltage meter, a humble pencil rests on a notepad.  The contrasting grains show that pencil and pad were carved independently and then joined.  Follow the grain through the five works, as you resist the urge to touch the tiny valve wheels, toggles, keyboards and knobs, and you become alert to the situational carving and carpentering of every detail.  At the same time you begin to realize that, despite their seeming exhaustiveness, Paine’s compositions are never too detailed.  Rather, they are pruned and arranged with Poussin-like discipline. “Machine of Indeterminacy,” with its elegant contrasts of orthogonal housing, spiraling screw blade, and pliant tubing, is a kind of Arcadia.  It has no logic as a machine, only as ideal landscape.

Where Paine does use a computer router, its characteristic texture is purposeful: in a wrinkly garbage bag in Checkpoint, which only heightens the lifelessness of the scene; and in the rock faces that replace a pinball machine’s playing and scoring boards in Intrusion.  Here the artificial look of the rock, which is emphasized by stripes of wood lamination, adds to the Magrittean enigma: is it modeled on genuine igneous intrusion or on a faux-rock climbing wall?  Either way, the urge to pull the plunger and launch a ball is palpable.  An especially synthetic gulley begs for a wayward pinball to spiral into its too-smoothly rounded contours.  In vain one checks one’s pockets for a perfectly notched and faceted maple quarter.

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Good exhibitions are designed to create a visual program of content and experiences that communicate affect most effectively. Curators and designers consider a number of factors to ensure that the visual experience — the look and feel — of the space accurately conveys the story they want to tell about the work: What if the art is lighted from below or above? How might the object look hanging from the rafters or on the floor? What if the walls aren’t white? What if the physical environment is not rectinlinear?

In March 1947, renowned dealer Alexander Iolas — then director of Hugo Gallery — sought to push the boundaries of curatorial license through a breathtaking environment for modern art in the exhibition “Bloodflames.” The show featured art curated by Nicolas Calas installed in the unconventional Fredrick Kiesler-designed environment filled with bright, bold colors and sloping walls. Works by Gorky, Noguchi, Lam, and Matta among others lay propped against walls, hanging from the ceiling, and jutting out at odd angles. Paul Kasmin, in collaboration with Rail Curatorial Projects, revisited this seminal exhibition through “Bloodflames Revisited,” curated by artist, writer, and Brooklyn Rail publisher Phong Bui.

Filling the expanse of both Kasmin galleries, “Bloodflames Revisited” features work from more than 20 artists, including Will Ryman, Cindy Sherman, Chris Martin, and Roxy Paine. While certainly not as radical and disruptive to the senses as the original — you’ll find no sloping exhibition walls or amorphous blobs interspersed between works of art at Kasmin — this contemporary response to “Bloodflames” presents an effective and thoughtful alternative to the traditional white-cube exhibition as we know it. Upon entering the galleries, viewers are jarred by Crayola-colored walls that stretch from the hay-covered floor to the ceiling. “Bloodflames Revisited” is filled with artwork, although the orange-yellow of the walls and the earthy smell of hay trigger the senses to conclude the opposite. Walking into the exhibit spaces takes a bit of re-orientation that immediately calls into question the visual cues we associate with the display of cultural objects. Is it the color on the walls the risers or the hay beneath our feet that suggests everything we experience and see in this space can be questioned?

I walked through the 27^th Street gallery as if down a pirate’s gangplank and felt a relationship to the artworks that unsettled me. When we go the gallery or the museum, we stand apart from the art and typically view it from eye level. Standing on the riser, I looked down on Tunga’s sculptural assemblages, and my eyes rested on the top third of Deborah Kass’s and Alex Katz’s paintings. I decided to surrender to the moment, realizing that the exhibition was successful in its premise: it had indeed forced me to interrogate ideas I had internalized about what my relationship to the art should be as a viewer.

Glenn Ligon’s electric blue and neon green Niggers Ain’t Scared (1996), from the Richard Pryor joke paintings series is still jarring, even when viewed from above. “Alot of niggers ain’t scared, youknowwhatImean?” the text begins in Ligon’s signature stenciling style of imperfection. “I mean like when the Martians landed and shit white folks got all scared.” In an additional act of visual violence, the stenciled words smear down the canvas drawing more attention to the textual dissonance. “Nothing can scare a nigger after 400 years of this shit,” the joke concludes.

Nearby, Lynda Benglis’s giant half sphere of red-orange tinted polyurethane protrudes off of the wall as if floating in space.Benglis developed the brain matter-like forms of her metal and polyurethane half-spheres after combining elements from her work with knotted metal in the 1970s and glass in the 1980s. After discovering she could make knots of glass with her hands using technology, she gained a greater understanding of the material’s properties and began casting concave and convex forms. D’Arrest (2009) is mesmerizing, due in part to its relationship to light. The pigmented polyurethane seems to absorb light while reflecting it, causing it to act like a proprioceptor. The form appears to change as its jelly-like squiggles catch the light from various angles.

On Tenth Avenue, my viewing experience was altered still. The exhibition continued to use bold colors and elevated platforms, but the limitations of the physical space were brought into view more sharply. The snaking riser connecting the two viewing spaces here felt especially distracting, which encouraged me to step down and freely traipse around through the hay. As I examined Do Ho Suh’s stove from the Specimens series, I was reminded of the relationship between belonging and assimilation. In the series, the artist explores his own relationship to cultural displacement and belonging by making scale replicas of items from his New York apartment using only polyester fitted over wire armatures. The translucent material reveals while it conceals, showing some of the internal structure of the object yet protecting the vulnerable insides.

Much of our visual viewing experience is guided by subtle contextual clues: the height of the walls, the lighting, the props on which art objects reside, etc. What other stories do cultural objects reveal through the environment in which they are presented? How can altering the visual context of an artwork allow us to see it fully? The ideas presented in “Bloodflames” and its modern-day re-imagining emphasize the possibilities in disrupting how we relate to art through the physical space where it is presented. Bui fiddles with some of the contemporary conventions of exhibition design by swapping out sterile white walls and employing our other five senses in the viewing experience. It is a welcomed disturbance. Though Kasmin’s gallery spaces will return to their familiar spotless white and polished concrete in a few weeks, “Bloodflames Revisited” serves as a reminder that the relationship between viewer and art object can — and should be — personal and visceral.

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Alexandra Anderson-Spivy, Stephanie Buhmann, and Peter Plagens joined David Cohen to discuss James Casebere at Sean Kelly Gallery, Sherrie Levine at Paula Cooper Gallery, Wangechi Mutu at Gladstone Gallery, and Roxy Paine at James Cohan Gallery.

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Timed to open the same week as The Armory Show on the piers, the ADAA’s long-running fair is Blue Chip city, with high-end historical and contemporary offerings. The name confusion between the two fairs is an ongoing source of befuddlement to the general public—and probably part of some larger, intentional strategy.

ROLLING OUT THE GRAY CARPET

POWER PARTNERS

A preview and press conference kicked things off, with remarks from Mayor Bloomberg. Whisked in to the assembled, he responded to a heckler: “Am I here to buy art? Not today.” He went on to cite the economic facts: a projected $44 million in activity for the fairs overall, including some $1.8 in tax revenues. He estimated some 60,000 visitors for the combined events, with 60 percent of those coming from out-of-town.

FEELING VISIONARY

Charles Long, idiosyncratic sculptor of biomorphic follies, was on hand, overseeing the installation of his solo exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar’s booth. This comprises three wall-mounted Saarinen-inspired tables that have undergone surrealist transformations, their tops facing viewers, hiding strange agglomerations behind. Long says he’s giving us an “alternate reality” of “displaced gravitational force,” playing off of the modernist tables and chairs found ubiquitously in surrounding booths.

EMOTIONAL OVERLOAD

“Optimistic” is how gallery employee Allana Strong categorized the Vivian Horan Fine Art booth, with its mirror-surfaced words by local artist Rob Wynne. I asked Strong if she felt her own “invisible life” or “destiny” in their presence. “My destiny, I hope, is to have my own gallery in a few years,” she mused.

JAFFE JUMPS

Tibor de Nagy’s booth is given over to the remarkably sophisticated and exuberant abstractions of Shirley Jaffe, a true “American in Paris” expatriate working at the top of her form at age 87. The artist was in town for Tuesday evening’s planned festivities, to be followed soon by a proper show at the 57th Street gallery.

SPERO’S LIFE LINE

Another strong solo consisted of Nancy Spero’s 1996 piece, “Sheela-Na-Gig at Home,” a clothesline installation strung with unique prints of a female fertility god and various undergarments, accompanied by a video of the artist (1926-2009), which finishes with her saying, “I have to get the dishes done.” Asked if she could relate to Spero’s wry feminist predicament, Lelong director Sabbatino responded, “I have a dryer.”

MATCHING ENSEMBLES

Greenberg Van Doren mounted a fine 1950s-1960s survey of works from the estate of still-underrated ab-ex master James Brooks. The lush brushstrokes of his earlier canvases are pared down to gorgeous graphic Matissian elements in later cut-paper collages.

HEADS YOU WIN

Gallery Michael Werner, of Cologne and New York, juxtaposed modernist works of Francis Picabia with the neo-expressionism of Georg Baselitz and Eugene Leroix and a contemporary work by Thomas Houseago, an emerging talent from Los Angeles. The results are authoritative and convincing.

GERMAN SPOKEN HERE

GESTURE AND FORM

The survey of Roxy Paine drawings and sculptures at James Cohan’s brings a personal response to our post-industrial landscape. His artificial take on nature is showcased not only in “tree” studies, but also in the products of his sculpture and painting “machines.” Gallery employee Goodson spoke of the “accresive process” of dropping heated “low-density polyethylene” on a conveyer belt to pleasingly accidental results. Here’s hoping that fair attendees will make the natural connections to Brancusi and Arp.

This is Blue Chip, after all.

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Maelstrom, Roxy Paine’s magnificently intricate installation currently on the roof garden of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is to date the most prominent offspring of a rapidly evolving typology, lifesize tree golems rendered in stainless steel.  Paine manages to steer these leafless “Dendroids,” as he calls them, between the Scylla of transparency and the Charibdis of mechanization, unyielding hazards to authorship of his own contrarian devising established by two other families of sculpture.  On one side are Paine’s “Replicants,” portraits of notorious, untrustworthy plants and fungi fixed in eternal plastic with an exegetical fidelity to surpass the craftsmanship of the best diorama and Hollywood prop technicians.  Here the hand dissolves like the Cheshire Cat around the grin of its expertise.  But looming off to starboard are the industrial prototypes that have been tuned to glop, dip, carve, or spray potentially numberless unique artworks, induced but not touched by the artist.

Most disconcerting about these machines is how undeniably ravishing are the objects they produce.  The minimalist stalactites of Paint Dipper, the scholar’s canyons of Erosion Machine, and the impeccably grotesque, groovy meltdowns of SCUMAK, for example, flout the prerogatives of painting and sculpture not merely with sly, assembly-line standardization but in manifesting a literal and figurative gravity to die for.  Neither accidental nor pre-determined, rather the emanations of carefully calibrated tolerances prodded by stochastic input, these formidable, ever-machining editions should make contemporary painters and sculptors tremble on qualitative, not just quantitative, terms.

Fortunately for the post-post-humanists among us, the Dendroids point the way past endgame perils to open sea, in part by locating an improbable wiggle room in the otherworldly sheen of stainless steel.  This unforgiving, perfectionist material can absorb delight in surface mimicry––a shelf fungus here, a splintering fracture there––while also reconstituting organic brachiation within the industrial logic of diminishing diameters of pipestock, thus positing the artist, himself, as art-making machine.  With these shimmering “substitutes,” “placebos” and “misnomers” (sampling from a list of the artist’s trickster titles) Paine can succumb as nowhere else to expressive selectivity along a sliding scale of verisimilitude in service to his barbed, alienated narrative.

All the more so with Maelstrom. Both a culmination and a transitional piece, it is full of dead ends and abundant new growth.  By relaxing the explicit tree metaphor, letting it bleed into neurology and other sorts of rhizomic, entangled hierarchies, Paine makes available at eye-level the most tender manipulations of bending, welding and grinding.  Delicate bud-like terminations, puns of weld-burr annual rings, tuberous bulgings and whittled, indented slicings need no longer kowtow to a logic of ramified extremity hoist to the clouds, but may arise at electively rhythmic intervals.

2007’s Conjoined, originally installed in Madison Square Park, was the first dendroid to violate strict branching, its two-trunked logic reversing flow at achingly grafted fingertwigs.  It seemed as if the trees could neither part nor fully embrace––a lyrical enactment of killing the thing you love.  In Maelstrom, the grafting is general, making for strange loops everywhere.  The greater prominence of the artist’s hand may be the strangest loop of all given Paine’s assassinations of the romantic notion of creativity––the very thing Paine, and contemporary art by and large, can neither embrace nor let go of.

Maelstrom’s interpretive vectors are more scattershot than those of Conjoined.  They can be seen to grasp at every straw: connecting up to fire standpipes (presumably ersatz) and thus the hydraulic infrastructure of civilization; rooting into plant box, tendrilling into trellis, diving into yew hedge and gesturing at the pastoral of Central Park beyond, all places where nature submits, for the moment, to orthogonal impoundment; inveigling the sky for a chaotic flash of catharsis; and in numerous places sheering off flush at the decking upon which the massive tumbleweed nestles with deceptive buoyancy, miming penetration through the pink granite pavestone into the whole history of visual culture theorized below.  Indeed, these infiltrating shoots might be imagined regrouping underfoot into the rhizomes of a far larger colossus.  Everything from ripped Greek wrestlers to Chinese zigzag pines, from Twomblys to Bierstadts, from medieval armor to Pictures Generation quotation can be thought of as nodes of the vast, implicit tangle.

Coincidently or not, David Smith’s Becca from 1965 is displayed directly beneath, several floors down, its plates of welded stainless buffed to a mesmerizing holographic luster.  Paine’s use of the same alloy in tubular form is as thoroughly original.  Manipulating bench tools that bend with pulverizing force as if they were pliers, he has achieved in the tuberous trunks of Maelstrom the homuncular suggestiveness of the mandrake root.  He can arc weld to an uncanny level of detail.  Most astonishing of all is how Maelstrom exploits the tensile spectrum of the material: the gentlest breeze, the tappings of unsupervised toddlers cause the massive complex to bounce wistfully in its thinner linkages, like sprung vines.  If kinetic sculpture tends to be irreducibly robotic, it’s because life forms have no moving parts.  Here, Paine has realized, by metallurgical essence, a truer sort of animation worthy of a latter-day Bernini.

Maelstrom is as limited as it is graced by the site and institution.  Can one doubt, for example, that Paine would prefer to physically perforate the museum’s inviolable granite deck with its shoots, rather than simulating penetration?  (For that matter, a money shot mentality might demand that a future work be tied in biologically to surrounding plant forms.)  And of course the Met will not permit you to experience Maelstrom’s radiant calligraphy in the full range of light––alas not at dark, not in the rain, certainly not during lightning storms.  In authorized weather the roof garden becomes the upper deck of a tour bus.  Still, the site’s command over Central Park is privileged, imperial.  From its Gilded Age gilded cage, Maelstrom leverages its formal and conceptual intricacies to scale across the world’s largest terrarium below, entangling the Park’s facts and fantasies in its matrix––precisely what Christo and Jean-Claude’s gaudy and overcompensating The Gates failed to do.  Recalling also Paine’s 2002 tree, Bluff, installed among the Park’s doomed elms, he has succeeded in making public sculpture that exchanges DNA like a retrovirus with surroundings too iconic and mediated for less infectious work.

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Paine until February 25
533 W. 26th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-714-9500

Thomas Hirschhorn and Roxy Paine, two sculptors with ambitious installations in Chelsea right now, might seem diametrically opposed in terms of sensibility, representing Dionysian and Apollonian extremes of anarchy and order, sloppiness and control. But they might equally be different branches of the same tree: They are united by dark visions of the opposition of the natural and the mechanical, humankind and the universe.

Mr. Hirschhorn’s sprawling installation at Gladstone, the Paris-based Swiss artist’s second with that gallery, is a kind of adolescent crap-fest, exuding the raw urgency and nonchalent makeshift of protest art. The obsessive-compulsive use of cheap, found materials also lends a whiff of outsider art to the project. In contrast, Brooklyn-based Mr. Paine’s sculptures are hi-tech and precisionist, impeccably crafted and sophisticated in their understanding of art-world issues. But his conception and execution are taken to such knowing extremes that Mr. Paine’s ingenuities have a similar nuttiness to the low-tech, trashy approach of Mr. Hirschhorn.

Mr. Hirschhorn’s installation, titled “Superficial Engagement,” is a bizarre cacophony of light and dark — literally and metaphorically. Arranged on four platforms that fill the gallery to bursting point, and seemingly pulled together in a hurry, they slap together imagery from incongruous sources: geometric and kinetic art from the 1960s, mangled corpses from the Iraqi conflict. Such a jarring juxtaposition of chirpy, optimistic art and gross, grim reality — at respective heighs of the abstract and the visceral — suggests a collision of the artist’s own values and intentions. He oscillates between irony and angst, whimsy and agitprop.

This seems at first to be a phantasmagoric overload of ideas and things. But there is method in the madness. The gruesome war images, culled from the Internet and printed with an indignant sense of the provisional, dwell without remorse on battered and charred remains and body parts. A man dotes on the decapitated head of a friend or relative; a scorched torso lies on a roadside; an eviscerated groin spews mutilated innards.

The abstract art from the 1960s is represented in equally mediated form: photocopies of magazine articles; spiral motifs printed on CD-cases; battered, worn-out monitors with fading screen savers. Printed images, whether of art or war, are scotch-taped to old planks or scraps of carton.

Another motif running through the installation is nails. These occupy an ambiguous space between war and abstraction, destruction and repair. Buckets of nails and hammers and drills seem to invite intrepid viewers to leave their mark. (I heard the drill going at one point.) Nails crowd into horizontal planks, logs, and mannequins. In the planks they have a purely formal elegance, recalling the constructivist art of the Brazillian Jesus Rafael Soto. On the mannequins, by contrast, they have a menacing, surreal mystery. This brings African sculpture to mind, of which there is actually an example included, an incongruous addition to an otherwise detritus-only mix.

Although the juxtapositions are too extreme to mean anything obvious, the work has the energy of propaganda. But what ideology does this art actually serve?

The answer lies, perhaps, in one other ingredient. Obvioulsy of personal importance to the artist, though a buried clue, visually, is a text about the life and times of the Swiss medium, healer, and researcher Emma Kunz (1892–1963), presented on a makeshift lectern in front of one of the stage sets. Some of the childlike geometric patterns transpire to be copies of her visionary designs.

This interest in art as psychic healing (recalling Joseph Beuys) adds an earnest, spiritual dimension to Mr. Hirschhorn’s otherwise bewilderingly indulgent collision of purist abstraction and gruesome reportage. It might prove too obscure a hint of idealism, however, to redeem the work of its puerile addiction to the macabre and the scatological.

The collision of the mechanical and the organic in Mr. Paine’s work is a kind of theater of the absurd on par with Mr. Hirschhorn’s schoolboy dada. Mr. Paine is probably best known, since the 2002 Whitney Biennial, for his steel trees, fabricated with precision not just to look but to “work” like actual, growing trees. But he first came to art-world attention with two bodies of work: hyperrealistic synthetic representations of mushrooms, and madcap machines for making art where a canvas would be robotically lowered into a vat of paint following computerized instructions.

Mr. Paine has moved on from a deconstruction of artistic creativity to a reconstruction of geological process. It’s as if he were saying, having debunked art, let’s take on God.

“Erosion Machine” (2005) uses a manically efficient factory setup of a computer, robotics, and compressor and vacuum devices to program the controlled erosion of a block of sandstone. The erosion takes place within a sealed glass vitrine. Every so often the robot sets to work, blasting the stone according to a program that follows an arbitrarily chosen but purposive set of data — the weather reports in Bridgehampton in the summer of 1990.

Another kinetic sculpture, “Unexplained Object” (2005), also works according to arcane data. A canvas tent that wobbles around as if a couple were making love inside turns out to be programmed by a Geiger counter that records, in actual time, levels of radioactivity in the environment. Again, the Paine principle is to create a simple but enigmatic effect from complex but efficient information.

Another sculpture — this one in the mold of his mushrooms — is “Weed Choked Garden” (1998–2005), a lovingly literal representation in synthetic materials of a rotting vegetable patch. In a back gallery is blown-up piece of head cheese, also in resins and plastics. A final work underscores the artist’s pessimism: “Bad Planet” (2005), a gruesomely blotchy, uninhabitable orb with a diameter of 5 feet. It looks like a hapless planet from “The Little Prince,” about to implode from its own inner corruption.

It is an impressively crafted work, but like the rest of this exhibition it is unlikely to evoke much by way of fear or awe. Too pretty looking, conceptually neat, and merely bemusing for the sublime nihilism they intimate, Mr. Paine’s artworks offer a kind of Madame Tussaud’s experience for the artworld.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, January 19, 2006

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